Longitudinal trends of real-world evidence (RWE) reporting in oncology conferences: An 11-year ASCO Annual Meeting analysis.
Authors: Farhan Azad, Jiahua Zhang, Othman Salim Akhtar, Anthony George, Kristopher Attwood, Pallawi Torka
Journal: Journal of Clinical Oncology (2022)

e18748 Background: Randomized-controlled trials are the gold-standard of clinical research. However, majority of patients with cancer (&gt; 95%) are ineligible/unable to participate in these studies. Retrospective studies using real-world evidence (RWE) help fill the knowledge gap by reporting outcomes in under-represented populations such as patients with rare diseases, comorbidities or those at extremes of age. There is limited data on the pattern and quality of RWE reporting at oncology meetings or in the literature. In this study, we examine longitudinal trends in RWE reporting at ASCO annual meetings over an 11-year period. Methods: We used the search items “retrospective”, “real world” and “observational” to identify all retrospective observational studies reported between 2011 and 2021 at ASCO annual meetings. Population size, number of centers and topics represented were recorded. For studies selected as oral presentations, details about subsequent publication of the full manuscripts was also collected. The statistical significance of reporting trends was tested using the Cochran-Armitage trend test, and the Pearson chi-square test was used to study associations between categorical variables. Results: A total of 49,190 abstracts were reviewed and 6742 (13.7%) studies reporting RWE were identified. There was an increase in the relative frequency of studies reporting RWE, from 13.8% of all abstracts in 2011 to 16.2% in 2021, p &lt; .0001. There was also an increase in the proportion of real-world studies with patient populations of ≥1000 over time (14.6% in 2011 to 19.9% in 2021, p= .0001), with fewer studies including ≤100 patients over the same period (41.4% to 32.3%, p= .0181). Overall, a majority of these studies (70.1%, 4785/6742) were accepted for publication only with a decrease in proportion of studies accepted as posters (43.9% in 2011 to 30.5% in 2021, p &lt; .0001). There was no significant trend in proportion of studies accepted as oral presentations over the same period (.19% to 1.96%, p= .134). There was an association between number of institutions involved, population size and acceptance category (publication only vs poster or oral), p&lt; .001). Only 27.2% of single-center studies were accepted for poster/oral presentation in comparison to 43.6% of studies involving multiple centers. Out of 54 studies that were accepted for oral presentations, 59.3% (32/54) involved ≥1000 patients ( p&lt; .001); 28/54 were published in Pubmed-indexed journals (highest impact factor, 32.98). Conclusions: There has been a significant increase in the relative frequency of studies reporting RWE at the ASCO Annual Meetings. Involvement of multiple institutions and larger patient populations allow for collection of higher quality data, and are associated with increased acceptance as oral/poster presentations versus publication only, underscoring the importance of multi-center collaboration.